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John Danenbarger
Sales and marketing executives are always looking for better ways to get leads from qualified prospects. Despite the complexities woven into Google Analytics’ new multi-channel sales funnels (see below), a way of tracking all the various origins of leads that come into a website, the dynamic remains the same as it’s always been: deals happen after a large audience is filtered into prospects, those prospects are sorted for leads, and those leads are converted into sales.
The Web delivers that audience, and the various platforms available on it provide companies with the tools to do the filtering, the sorting and even the converting too.
Each platform does that in a different way. A comprehensive online marketing strategy would make use of Facebook’s flexible engagement (see the link below), Twitter’s networking, and content marketing’s message-building to mine different parts of an audience and bring out the leads present in each group.
It’s a process that’s seen most clearly in email marketing.
A website might have thousands of visitors a day, most of whom will click through without leaving anything behind. A small fraction of those visitors though can be tempted to leave behind an email address in return for an offer of a free download or some other benefit. (For example, a platform such as TinyLetter now makes collecting those addresses simple enough for anyone to do.) Depending on the download they choose or the site on which they leave their email address, companies are able to create segmented lists that contain subscribers with a known interest in a particular kind of product.
That’s the first, filtering stage. It captures people who have a certain, though undefined, level of interest in a topic related to the product. The next stage, the process by which those prospects are converted into leads, can happen gradually as the company sends a regular stream of emails that don’t just offer deals, bargains and sales opportunities, but which contain enough usable content to build trust.
Users who are ready to convert will hit the Buy Now button contained in an email marketing letter; the remainder, who will be the majority, should be left with a deeper level of trust that increases the chances that they’ll buy in the future. Eventually, the prospects on the subscriber list should become leads when they click through to a sales page.
That process from audience to prospect to lead to, hopefully, customer is a dynamic that remains true in every sales mechanism, and it’s worth keeping in mind as you’re assessing the various platforms available online. Sites like Facebook might offer a bewildering array of different tools to keep users engaged and to draw in new visitors, from face tagging to video uploads, but they’re all ultimately geared towards pushing a mass that contains some potential buyers through the same funnel. Tagging images of customers in a store, for example, can help a company bring in more potential prospects by putting their name in front of that customer’s friends; announcing on the site that the company is making a limited-time offer will turn those prospects into leads.
It’s a process that should be familiar to any experience sales executive. As you’re wondering how to make best use of the Web, try asking yourself which tools match which parts of your sales funnel.
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